Shifting narrative Saipan's film-makers got the kit right but depiction of Keane's rant is problematic

All history is to some extent narrative.

- Jonathan Wilson

You cannot tell a story without in some way editing it, reducing it, compressing it. So anybody telling a story about a historical event, particularly one from the relatively recent past, risks outraging those who have studied it or remember it.

Saipan, Glenn Leyburn's and Lisa Barros D'Sa's film about the cataclysmic row between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy shortly before the 2002 World Cup, came out in Ireland on Boxing Day and will be released in the UK on 23 January. It is obsessed by detail: the tracksuits, the sweatshirts, the kits are all right. It's startling when the film cuts between reproductions of interviews and press conferences and actual footage to realise just how accurately these scenes have been recreated. Which raises two questions. What is the point? And how can such care have been taken over the look of the film when there are grotesque inventions and inaccuracies in the plotting and motivation? What do we gain by seeing Steve Coogan doing an impression of McCarthy in a post-match press conference when the press conference was filmed and the footage exists? The only logic is to maintain continuity for the scenes for which we don't have footage, of which the most important is, of course, the climactic "stick it up your bollocks" tirade in the hotel restaurant. But that scene is itself problematic.